The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose

Lizzy grabbed the rake from Ophelia. “Come on, girls—let’s put the tools away and cool off with some iced tea. Maybe the storm will blow over before we’re ready to head for home.”


A few minutes later, the four Dahlias were sitting around the green-painted table in the clubhouse kitchen, a pitcher of mint-flavored tea and a plate of Dr. George Washington Carver’s peanut cookies in front of them. The cookies had been baked by Roseanne, the cook at Magnolia Manor, Bessie Bloodworth’s boardinghouse for “genteel older ladies,” next door to the Dahlias’ clubhouse.

“That was good work this afternoon, ladies,” Lizzy said, pouring the tea. She looked around the table, thinking how much she cherished these three friends. She enjoyed all the Dahlias—like different varieties of roses, each one had her own particular beauty, while some had a few thorns. But the three sitting around the table with her this afternoon were very special.

“That was hard work,” Bessie said, pulling an embroidered hanky out of her sleeve and wiping her sweaty face with it. “But as the saying goes, we can’t plow a field by turning it over in our minds.”

Gray-haired Bessie was twenty years older than the others, but she could work as long and as hard as any of the younger women in the club. She always said she’d grown up with a hoe in her hand and okra and sunflower seeds in her pocket. Everybody valued her gardening experience, especially now that the Dahlias had decided to start raising vegetables in a big way.

Lizzy had been on the lookout for projects that would keep the club growing and working together, and the vegetable garden—a natural, really—had been her idea. The front yard of the clubhouse they had inherited from Dahlia Blackstone had once been filled with azaleas, roses, and hydrangeas, and behind the house had been almost an acre of beautiful flowers, sweeping down toward a clump of woods and a clear spring surrounded by bog iris, ferns, and pitcher plants. Mrs. Blackstone’s garden had been so beautiful that it had been featured in newspapers as far away as New Orleans and Miami, and visitors from all over the state had come to Darling to see it.

But by the time the Dahlias took it over, the flowers and shrubs were disconsolate and abandoned and the garden looked as if it had completely given up hope. Determined to rescue it and restore its former beauty, the members had pulled on their gardening gloves and set to work. They repaired the trellises for the Confederate jasmine and mandevilla and cut back the exuberant cross vine and honeysuckle on the fence. They cleared the curving perennial borders so that the Shasta daisies, phlox, iris, asters, and larkspur could stretch out and bloom. They divided and replanted the Easter lilies, spider lilies, oxblood lilies, and Mrs. Blackstone’s favorite orange ditch lilies. They also pruned Mrs. Blackstone’s many roses—the climbers, teas, ramblers, shrubs, and the unruly yellow Lady Banks, who had spread her sweeping skirts of green branches across the back corner. (“Give a Lady Banks an inch and she’ll take a mile,” Earlynn Biddle always said.)

But when all that was done, Lizzy didn’t let the ladies rest on their laurels. Next door to the clubhouse, on the corner, was a large vacant lot that had once been Mrs. Blackstone’s vegetable garden—the perfect place to grow vegetables. They had hired old Mr. Norris and his bay gelding, Racer, to plow the ground. Racer’s name was sort of a joke, because he was as slow as molasses on a cold January morning. But once the old horse made up his mind to get to work, he was all business, and Mr. Norris pocketed a few dollars every spring by plowing and harrowing the town gardens.

After Racer had finished plowing and harrowing the ground, the Dahlias got started, raking the soil smooth and marking the rows for the corn, green beans, collards, Swiss chard, okra, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, squash, melons, cucumbers, and sweet potatoes they intended to plant. Lizzy had pointed out that the money they earned from the sale of their vegetables could go to fund other projects, such as the herb garden they were planning at the Retirement Haven, the old folks’ home out on Rayburn Road, and the new landscaping they hoped to put in around the courthouse.